OCMS LECTURE

Geoffrey Studdert Kennedy:

The Pastor and the Suffering God

When I was asked for a provisional theme for this lecture last summer
it seemed a long way away and at that time my mind was occupied
with the race to finish a book on the theology of intercession. That
race was completed and for the moment at least, if I was to speak to
you about it, it would either involve repeating what I have said about
it that book (available now from Blackwells and all good bookshops),
or remind me painfully of its inadequacies.

I want instead to move sideways into a related area hoping not to
cause to much disappointment in my listeners. I want to consider the
question of human and divine suffering, and I want to consider it as a
problem which is pastoral and theological. It is a related area because
in mind at least both of these areas are alike considerations of
whether God can be affected by humanity. Intercession too is about
the passibility of God: whether can be changed by our prayers. For to
respond, to answer, is to be changed. In Answering God I argue that
a Trinitarian understanding of God indeed allows even, compels us
to think in such ways.

One of my prime motives in considering intercession at all was to
explore a mystery of Christian devotion and practice. I tried to
approach it not as a philosophical problem but as a pastoral concern:
how, and for what, should we pray. The problem of human suffering
is self-evidently a problem of pastoral concern also though I am
mindful that the way in which this is often currently configured is
somewhat recent, and perhaps, western. The question of Gods
suffering has also come to be configured as a matter of pastoral
theological concern. Reflection on pastoral practice is often held to be
page 1 of 22
facilitated by theological discussion of the suffering of God. We might
frame some of the issues like this:
o Is it helpful for our own suffering is shared in some way by God?
Or indeed by another?
o Can we legitimately move from human suffering to predicate
certain things of God and divine suffering? If so, how is this move
made? What can reflection on human suffering tells us about God?
o How is human suffering altered / transformed by Gods
relationship to it?
o What is said about the pastoral relationship itself by such
understandings of Gods (im)passibility? And does the pastoral
relationship in turn tell us anything about God?
In the time available this morning I am not going to give a definitive
answer to these questions. What I want to do is explore the debate
through the lens of a distinctly pastoral theology. Specifically, I want
use the thought of one pastor to illumine it, and then, having
considered some of the wider contemporary debate, to suggest that
that pastor might actually help us to be able to say something about
God. This is work that is in its gestation and I will welcome comment
and discussion when I have finished my presentation.

The reality of human suffering, in its infinite diversity, presents a
Christian pastor with some of his/her most challenging tasks. In the
debate the term suffering itself is not always examined or defined,
but Ill begin by quoting Roger Hurdings definition Suffering is the
experience of anguish or misery in which sentient beings are aware of
the deprivation of their intent or function. Hurding recognises that
suffering is relative to circumstances of place, possessions and
people.
1
Is it appropriate to ascribe suffering to God, to imagine that
God suffers? And if so (and if not), what are the implications for the
work of pastoral care and the thinking of pastoral theology?

1
In eds D J Atkinson & D H Field, New Dictionary of Christian Ethics and Pastoral
Theology, IVP: Leicester, 1995, p 823.
page 2 of 22

Through most of two millennia, the tradition has, at least by clear
majority view, always been reluctant to speak of Gods suffering
though recent critiques allege that this was because of an unfortunate
influence from Greek modes of thought. In British theology there were
a number of advances early in the twentieth century. A contributor to
this, though that contribution is still difficult to assess, was made by
a well-known pastor: Studdert Kennedy, the chaplain of the Great War
known as Woodbine Willie, began to articulate in verse some of the
insights which in their German manifestation later in the century
were to be called theology of the cross, and it is the work of that
pastor, Woodbine Willie himself, that I want to examine in more detail
first.

Studdert Kennedy
The twentieth century was an era when the passibility of God came to
be imagined it was also an era when men and women came to be
aware of the sufferings of their fellows. The trenches of the so-called
Great War stand as one of the iconic moments of this awareness. The
churches, in general, were wholeheartedly behind the war-effort. But
the effects on religious faith are thought to be negative. Where was
God in the trenches? There must have been many servicemen and
their relatives who concluded that God could not have been in the
trenches at all. Perhaps he sheltered thirty miles behind he lines with
the officers, or maybe he was - like the church that told his story -
some aloof irrelevance.

As soon as war broke out the churches took seriously their pastoral
duty to enlisted men. Chaplains of all denominations were serving at
the Front by late 1914. Baptist Union minutes from June and
September 1917 note the loss of Chaplains in action, though these
were not the first such losses.

page 3 of 22
When we turn to examine the role of army chaplains in general we
find a mixed picture. The most effective appear to have practiced
what they preached
2
and so gave an authenticity to their message.
3

Others, however, made a less favourable impression. Of the Chaplain-
General, Alan Wilkinson records that "his religious faith tripped too
easily off the tongue to make much contact with men facing deep and
agonising perplexities,"
4
while Roman Catholic chaplains sent men
into action "mentally and spiritually cleaned," the Church of England,
with orders not to go forward of Brigade HQ, "could only offer you a
cigarette."
5

What sort of consolation was that?
"They gave me names like their nature,
Compacted of laughter and tears,
A sweet that was born of the bitter,
A joke that was torn from the years

Of their travail and torture, Christ's fools,
Atoning my sins with their blood,
Who grinned in their agony sharing
The glorious madness of God.

That name! Let me hear it - the symbol
Of unpaid - unpayable debt,
For the men to whom I owed God's Peace,
I put off with a cigarette."

That poem, called "Woodbine Willie", is set at the very beginning of the
extraordinary collection of poetry The Unutterable Beauty by Geoffrey
Studdert Kennedy, who came to be known at the front, and in palaces

2
Captain Morgan Watcyn-Williams wrote: the padre had ever the same
straightforward message - a Power greater than war, love stronger than death, and
sacrifice the very gate of heaven. He was frank too, with a directness that could be
disconcerting, even when it helped. Quoted in Alan Wilkinson, The Church of
England and the First World War, p 53.
3
"Down on the Somme he won his MC. All round Delville and Longueval and
Guillemont the wounded came pouring in, but the padre never hesitated, and out
among the falling shells and flying splinters carried on with the work of rescue."
Quoted in Alan Wilkinson, The Church of England and the First World War, p 53.
4
Alan Wilkinson, The Church of England and the First World War, pp 124f.
5
Alan Wilkinson, The Church of England and the First World War, pp 111.
page 4 of 22
and parlours, as Woodbine Willie. The poem shows many of the
themes that this remarkable chaplain explores in poetry and prose
inspired by the front. "Compacted of laughter and tears, indicates
his genuine identification with the troops, solidarity in what Kennedy
usually calls a human madness but here has God share it. The
movement of incarnation is evident both in Kennedys own
identification with the troops and in what Kennedy will go on to say
about Gods own identification with them in their plight. The poem
'plays' with the concept of atonement, and reflects Kennedy's enduring
sense of never having done enough for those whom he served. He was
one who knew he gave no perfect model, but was conscious always of
his need to be open to renewal and forgiveness. His sins were atoned
by their (his soldiers) blood. Here at least was a man who knew that,
sometimes at least, the offer of a cigarette was utterly inadequate.
And yet perhaps sometimes, the woodbines became a kind of
sacrament.

An ordinand once asked for Kennedys views on the essential
qualifications for a clergyman. The reply came as the threefold office
of pastor, prophet and priest. Querying the last role the questioner
said: Do you mean one who dispenses the sacraments? Kennedy
replied: Yes, but more than that. I mean one who bears upon himself
the burden of the sins and sorrows of his people. In this regard, he
went on, he was continually aware of his own failures.
6


Born in 1883 of Irish Anglican stock, Kennedy was a gifted
communicator and an avaricious reader. He trained for the ministry
at Ripon Hall in Oxford, and after ordination he worked in a poor
parish in Rugby, had a brief spell in Leeds, and then became Vicar in

6
G A Studdert Kennedy: by his friends, Hodder & Stoughton: London 1929, ed J K
Mozley.
page 5 of 22
a downtown parish in Worcester in 1914.
7
War broke out in August
and in September 1914 Geoffrey Studdert Kennedy wrote these words
in his parish magazine:
I cannot say too strongly that I believe every able-bodied man
ought to volunteer for service anywhere. Here ought to be no
shirking of that duty.
8
This from the man who would, before long be writing this, Waste:
Waste of Muscle, waste of Brain,
Waste of Patience, waste of Pain,
Waste of Manhood, waste of Health,
Waste of Beauty, waste of Wealth,
Waste of Blood, and waste of Tears,
Waste of Youths most precious years,
Waste of ways the Saints have trod,
Waste of glory, Waste of God, -
War!

Soon Kennedy wanted to play a part in the war effort he had exhorted
his parishioners to be involved in. He seems to have thought about
ordinary enlisting, but by the end of 1914 was already beginning to
explore a Forces Chaplaincy. That was not entirely straightforward at
this time: he would have to make arrangements for his parish,
convince his Bishop, and the Chaplain-General an evangelical who
was suspicious of those who, like Kennedy, were associated with
Anglo-Catholicism (though pigeon-holing Kennedy so neatly seems
precarious). By December 1915 he had been appointed Temporary
Chaplain, and on Christmas day he found himself in France,
preaching to 400 men and receiving communicants in a barn, as a the
rain and guns thundered.


7
Quoted in W E Purcell, Woodbine Willie: A Biography, Hodder & Stoughton:
London. 1962, p 77.
8
Quoted in Purcell, Woodbine Willie, p 92.
page 6 of 22
On New Years day he was posted to Rouen, and a pattern begins to
emerge. Some joking and self-deprecation, a powerful sermon, and
some community singing. Afterwards he would have a queue of men
wanting him to read, or write, letters home. For those going to the
Front at the Railway Station he would walk up and down the line of
men with a quiet word, a copy of the NT, and a woodbine. Was this
really such cold comfort? Was any other sort possible? He wrote
back to Worcester how he would often have to cling on the final
carriage to complete this ministry, jumping off to watch the
disappearing tail-lights with a lump in his throat and a curse on the
sin that causes war. There is nothing glorious about this departure,
except the glory of their patience and grim determination. It is all
sordid and filthy.
9

In 1916, in advice given to fellow chaplains, the incarnational
movement is clearly understood:
Live with the men, go where they go, make up your mind that
you will share their risks, and more, if you can do any good.
You can take it that the best place for a padre is where there is
the most danger of death. Our first job is to go beyond the men
in self-sacrifice and reckless devotion. Dont be bamboozled
into believing that your proper place is behind the lines it
isnt.
10
Part of his strategy in getting alongside and winning the confidence of
the men was controversial. He swore to get their attention, beginning
one sermon I know what youre thinking, here comes that bloody
parson!
11
In the middle of 1917 he won the MC for conspicuous
gallantry and devotion to duty during the attack on Messines Ridge.
He fetched extra medical supplies by running through a shelled area,

9
Quoted in Michael Grundy, A Fiery Glow in the Darkness (Osborne: Worcester,
1997). P 40.
10
Quoted in Grundy, A Fiery Glow, p 44.
11
A Fiery Glow, p 44
page 7 of 22
and retrieved wounded men from no-mans land. There were reports
of prayers with the dying there too, and burials as the battle roared
about him.

Studdert Kennedy had turned his hand to poetry in Worcester before
the war, his verse from front found favour with the Chaplain General
and two collections were published for distribution among the men.
12

Its possible to discern hints of the influence of Houseman and Kipling,
and perhaps even Browning and Tennyson.
13


Kennedys experiences at the Front seem to have changed his view of
war rather rapidly. True, he still toured encouraging the troops in a
circus troop that included a boxer, two wrestlers, and a bayoneting
hero and maybe there was something showy about him that could
never resist an audience (or they him!). But his attitude to war
seemed to have little in common with that early magazine article.

While the poems seem interesting and often very effective, they are
probably not original in any literary way. But what of their theology?
His war poetry may not have the rigour or style of Owen or Sassoon,
but it reveals him as what we would not think of as a pastoral
theologian.

This in two ways: clearly he is someone whose poetic voice has a
decidedly pastoral perspective. For instance, Studdert Kennedy was
considered by some to be too understanding of the difficulties of
marriage and sexual relationships. This is clear from the very human,
and very short, Temptation:
Pray! Have I prayed! When I'm worn with all my praying
When Ive bored the blessed angels with my battery of prayer!

12
Kennedy gave all the royalties to a charity for the blind in Worcester!
13
I'm grateful to my colleague Dr Julian Thompsons professional eye on Studdert
Kennedys verse.
page 8 of 22
Its the proper thing to say but its only saying, saying,
And I cannot get to Jesus for the glory of her hair.

Or there is the similarly short A Scrap of paper, one of a number of
poems viewing the war with imagination from the Home Front:
Just a little scrap of paper
In a yellow envelope,
And the whole world is a ruin,
Even hope.
Here there we see evidence of the incarnational movement of empathy
which we discussed earlier.

Another of these poems is The Pensioner an example of the
Kipling-esque turning to dialect, which sometimes works and
sometimes doesnt. Here we hear a story of childhood sweethearts
who become a delightful married couple, with hints of sexual bliss
I can feel them red ot kisses
on my lips or on my air,
I can feel is arm tight round me,
Gawd! I tell ye it aint fair.
Look ye what the wars done at im,
Lying there as still as death.
See is mouth all screwed and twisted,
With the pain of drawing breath!
The woman knows she should be happy for her pension shes been
told so. But it does not slake her grief.
But my pension wont buy kisses,
An ell never kiss again,
E aint got no kissin in im,
Aint got nothing now but pain.
Not as I would ever change im
For the strongest man alive

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But I says let them as makes em
Fight their wars and mourn their dead,
Let their women sleep for ever
In a loveless, childless bed.
No I know it aint right talkin,
But theres times as I am wild.
Gawd! You dunno ow I wants it
Ow I wants a child is child.

This extraordinary poem shows a breadth of sympathy, and an
earthiness about his sympathies that is arresting. Again the
incarnational movement of empathy displays a disciplined and
compassionate imagination. There is something similar in the
searing I know not where they have laid him describing a mothers
sense of desolation for a son lost in action. She agonises, imagining
the body defiled and deserted and despite the Parsons reassurance
that its the soul not the body that matters, she complains the Parson
aint never ad no child.
But even a father never knows
The ache in a mothers heart,
When she and the body er body bore
Are severed and torn apart

Id like to know just where its laid,
That body my body bore,
And Id like to now wholl mother im
Out there in that other shore,
Who will be bearin the mothers part
And be makin your body, boy?
Who will be avin the mothers pain,
And avin the mothers joy?
Gawd, is it you? Then bow You down
And ark to a mothers prayer.
page 10 of 22
Dont keep it all to yourself, Good Lord,
But give is old mother a share.
Gimme a share of the travail pain
Of my own sons second birth,
Double the pain if you double the joy
That a mother feels on earth.
Gimme the sorrow and not the joy,
If that as to be Your will;
Gimme the labour and not the pride,
But make me is mother still.
Maybe the body as e shall wear
Is born of my breaking heart,
Maybe these pains are the new birth pangs
Whatll give my laddie is start.
Then Id not trouble ow hard they was,
Id gladly go through the mill,
If that noo body e wore were mine,
And I were is mother still.
This poem may be the most remarkable of all. With extraordinary
imaginative power Kennedy not only empathetically perceives the pain
of the bereaved mother but also goes a step further, mysteriously
suggesting the pain of the second birth is born by God as the dead
son is reborn to eternal life. Kennedys experience of the pain of his
men, and his imaginative construal of the pain of the grieving mother,
allows him to suggest something about the pain of God who also,
Kennedy would say, knows the loss of a Son.

In both of these pastoral poems Kennedy succeeds not only in
making us look at the reality of God in a surprising way (here as one
who bears a mother-pain), but also shows a brave attempt to
empathise with women in their suffering. All this suffering, Kennedy
affirms, is the very suffering of God.

page 11 of 22
This indicates that Studdert Kennedy is a pastoral theologian in
another way too. In a more modern usage of the expression we mean
to speak of the way in which pastoral experience rather than being
the application of theology acquired elsewhere actually becomes the
raw material of that theology. The practice shapes the theory, not
always the other way around. This is also evidenced in his poetry.
Whether or not Kennedy held a view of the passibility of God before
the war, it is clear that his wartime service has informed and
deepened such a view.

His view of the suffering of God is distinctly Christocentric, and
crucicentric. In The Comrade God he addresses the one who dwells
in depths of timeless being, who can count the stars upon their
courses, and who views earth from the standpoint of eternity. Such a
God, who watches benignly but aloofly, is
too great to love me,
Since thou dost reign beyond the reach of tears

Only in Him can I find home to hide me,
Who on the Cross was slain to rise again;
Only with Him, my Comrade God, beside me,
Can I go forth to war with sin and pain.

This same theme is explored in The Suffering God:
If He could speak, that victim torn and bleeding,
Caught in His pain and nailed upon the Cross.
Has he to give the comfort souls are needing?
Could he destroy the bitterness of loss?

Once and for all men say He came and bore it,
Once and for all set up His throne on high,
Conquered the world and set His standard oer it,
Dying that once, that men may never die.
page 12 of 22

But such a once and for all suffering is not enough; it does not meet
the pastoral needs of the men to whom he ministers. So Kennedy has
to delve deeper into the mystery of the cross.
How can it be that God can reign in glory,
Calmly content with what his Love has done,
Reading unmoved the piteous shameful story,
All the vile deeds men do beneath the sun

Father, if He, Christ, were Thy Revealer,
Truly the First begotten of the Lord,
Then must Thou be a Suffrer and a Healer,
Pierced to the heart by the sorrow of the sword.

Then must it mean, not only that thy sorrow
Smote Thee that once upon the lonely tree,
But that to-day, to-night, and on the morrow,
Still it will come, O Gallant God, to thee

Kennedys doctrine of God seems to have been thoroughly
Trinitarian,
14
and elsewhere he returns to the Trinitarian implications of the Cross:
All through the ages men have crucified God, not knowing what
they did There has always been a voice crying in the heart of

14
He concludes his short book on Christian basics, The Wicket Gate, as follows:
The doctrine of the Blessed Trinity must be brought out of the study into the street,
and must lay hold on men [sic], not as a theory, but as an experience. The Father
and the Son must become One in our souls, and, from that unity proceeding, there
must descend upon the Church of the Holy Spirit, the Lord and Giver of Life, who
will drive all Christians out to bear the sin of the world, and claim its kingdoms as
the kingdoms of Christ, crying in their hearts Thine is the Kingdom, the Power and
the Glory, for ever and ever, Amen. Geoffrey Studdert Kennedy, The Wicket Gate,
reprinted in The Best of Studdert Kennedy: selected from his writing by a friend
(Hodder & Stoughton: London, 1947), p 123.
page 13 of 22
God, appealing to his Fatherhood, Forgive them for they know
not what they do.
15
This glimpse into the inner life of God, informed by his wartime
service, suggests that the Trinity is formed in the crying of the
suffering son to the fatherhood of God.

There is no suggestion even through the awfulness of war that the
Suffering God bids us lay down arms. Kennedy does not become a
pacifist in the trenches so far as we can make out he would probably
have been a pretty useless pastor if he had! It is part of Gods
suffering, like humanitys, that war is necessary albeit tragic and
wasteful. Kennedy is a pastoral theologian in that his experience of
the war shapes his thinking about God. That thinking in turn returns
to give comfort to those with whom he serves, it is even able to offer
support and comfort to those about to go and fight the good fight.
16

In what way has Kennedys poetic insight fro the pastors perspective
into God and the human condition enriched our thinking about each
of these things?

The Contemporary Debate about the Passibility of God
One of the unresolved questions which arises when one considers
Kennedys suggestions is: from where did he get such ideas? As J K
Mozley makes clear in his 1926 The Impassibility of God, the
beginnings of the reaction against traditional doctrine of impassibility
are difficult to discern. Such hints as are made are unsystematic and
inconsistent, but they begin sometime in the 19
th
century. He
considers the possible influence of Pringle-Pattison and William
James, and Horace Bushnell right back in 1866. But we do not have
the information that allows us easily to move from any one of these
possible influences, or others that Mozley mentions, to Kennedy.

15
Studdert Kennedy, Food for Thought, reprinted in The Best of, p 84.
16
Poems like The Sniper and No Retaliation acknowledge the enemy as legitimate
targets. Though these poems are in dialect, cast in anothers voice.
page 14 of 22

If the tide in the twentieth century seemed to be flowing toward divine
passibility, the issue remains contentious. The most recent rigorous
and persuasive defence of the traditional doctrine of divine
impassibility is certainly offered by Tom Weinandy in his Can God
Suffer?

He begins by arguing for the ontological otherness of God:
17
can the
Wholly Other change? Such language cannot be used literally,
according to Weinandy. God does not change because his love is
always constant. Rather, as he will go on to say, God does not change
at all, even in response to human persons, because Gods love is
supremely constant. What changes is our appreciation or experience
of Gods love according to our changing circumstances. To say this
expresses his total otherness.
18


Weinandys discussion of the Trinity speaks of the primacy of
relationships and verbs: Father, Son and Spirit are verbs. This is the
theological statement of the more philosophical affirmation that God is
actus purus, pure act. The persons of the Trinity are each alike
impassible, because, as subsistent relations fully in act, they are
already completely and utterly passionate in their self-giving to one
another and cannot become more passionate for they are constituted,
and subsist, in this mutual self-giving.
19

He argues that
The simple answer to the question: Does God suffer? is No,
God in himself as God does not suffer. To say that God does
not suffer means not only that he not feel any physical pain,
since he is not corporeal, but also that he does not undergo

17
Can God suffer? p. 53.
18
Can God suffer? p. 61.
19
pp. 119f.
page 15 of 22
some passible changes of state whereby he experiences some
form of divine emotional agitation, anguish, agony, or distress.
God is never in a state of inner angst.
20

Gods love, like human love, embraces, e.g., commitment, affection,
joy, mercy, forgiveness, grief, anger, admonition, even condemnation.
But humans actualise these at particular moments: because Gods
love is fully in act and all these aspects of love are fully actualised
always within the Trinity. God does not change his manner or
expression of love when someone repents, or suffers injustice:
Eternally God is immutably and impassibly adapted to every
situation and circumstance, not because his love is indifferent
and unresponsive, but because his love, with all its facets, is
fully in act, and so he is supremely and utterly responsive to
every situation and circumstance.
21

But here we begin to detect some of the problems with this position.
What looks like a response to creation, and to human persons is
nothing of the sort. God does not respond. Apparently his Wholly
Otherness prevents God from doing so. God cannot vary his reaction
to any situation: not to my stubbing my toe in the dark last night after
finishing this lecture, not to the mother who grieves for her lost son on
Flanders field, not to the gassing of millions of Jews in Auschwitz.
What changes is that human persons apprehend Gods constant and
never changing love (admittedly a rich love, with commitment, anger,
compassion etc within it) differently according to their circumstances.

What to Weinandy seems like a strength will seem to others more of a
lack. God cannot respond, he is trapped by his Otherness. Weinandy
want to say that if God responded he would cease to be Other, cease
to be God. But Barth can affirm that the Otherness of God is this:

20
Can God Suffer? p. 153.
21
Can God Suffer? p. 162.
page 16 of 22
that God determines to be Who He Is, and not be determined by some
ontological necessity, not even the necessities which g with being
Wholly Other.

In fact, if we look more closely at Weinandys account of God as actus
purus we see a similar problem. He takes issue with those who
suggest that this Classical view of God is of a static, inert reality that
this is, as has been claimed, the legacy of Greek philosophy in this
regard. Certainly he succeeds in sketching a vision of God in a more
dynamic way as pure act, in constant motion. But the problem arises
when this motion is examined, for it is utterly constant, and has to be.
Never varying in any way, this pure act seems less distinguishable
from stillness than we might have at first imagined.

Weinandys argument is attractive in many respects, and has an
internal coherence to it. But we seem to have a vision of constancy
and assurance it is at the cost of responsiveness and what we can
recognise as true relationality.

The earliest theologians feared to speak of the suffering of God, linking
such talk change in God and therefore with diminution. The
pastoral corollary of this was often a certain sort of resignation allied
to an implicit theological determinism. Suffering was meant to be, or
served some higher purpose. It could easily result in the sort of
reaction Fiddes relates at the beginning of his chapter on The
Vulnerable God and the Problem of Suffering
22
where a woman beset
by chronic illness says I have come a tacit agreement with God that
we just dont talk about it any longer. There is clearly a need for a
theology which funds the conversation which pastors share with
those who suffer for, as Fiddes goes on to point out, the way pastors
act and react will be guided by the image of God that they hold.

22
Participating in God, ch 5.
page 17 of 22
His case is that basic to any understanding of the problem of suffering
is the suffering of God. Jesus cry of dereliction on the cross is a
sound place to make connections with Moltmanns insight that there
is here a death, and a loss, in God.

In the past Christian theologians took rather lightly the OT witness to
a God who suffered because of his love for his people. God is spoken
of as one who grieves, is disappointed, and even labours under the
burden of Israels plight. These were usually thought of as
accommodations to human understanding, anthropomorphisms
rather than descriptions of how God really is.
23
Paul Fiddes points
out that often we are not simply shown God sharing human suffering,
but God calling on the prophet to share his suffering! The insight into
the suffering of God granted to Hosea for instance, allows Hosea to see
more clearly the plight of the people.
24

In the NT the cross assumes such a central position that it seems
remarkable that Christians were able to defend God from the
imputation of suffering for so long. By using the two-nature doctrine
theology sought to avoid the conclusion that God suffers, and there is
an intrinsically Nestorian feel about most of the discussion that tried
to say that Jesus suffered in his human nature, and that God only
shared this through the communcatio idiomatum.

Barth moved some way towards the theology of the cross. He could
speak of a sorrow in the heart of God, which in some way is prior to
(yet greater than) any sorrow in the heart of human beings.
25
But he
also speaks of the suffering of the Father in the offering and sending
of the Son as an alien suffering, a suffering God takes to himself, but
which is not really his own suffering. God chooses to identify with

23
Paul Fiddes, The Creative Suffering of God (OUP, Oxford 1988), pp19f.
24
e.g. Hosea 11: 8-9.
25
Church Dogmatics, IV.2, p 225.
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it.
26
In such a way Barth is able to maintain Gods sovereignty over
the suffering. He also says that Gods suffering differs from ours in
that it is not passive but active God always maintains the initiative,
and the suffering originates in himself rather than outside of himself.
Barths statements perhaps find resolution through his doctrine of
election, which also links to divine suffering. For God chose to be the
God of our humanity, and so God elected our suffering He elected
it as his own suffering.
27

Barths seeks to avoid saying that suffering makes God vulnerable to
diminution, to becoming less God - one of the early motives in
upholding the impassibility of God, as it is in Weinandys argument.

Moltmann wants to go further than saying that God identifies with
human suffering. For him the significance of the cross is such as to
call for a revolution in the very concept of God
28
, because it is an
event between God and God, Father and Son.

For Moltmann, God in his love identifies with humanity and so
becomes both vulnerable and changeable. This has to be explained
not by talking of the two natures, but the three persons of the trinity.
The Son is delivered up to death by the Father. In what Moltmann
calls patricompassionism
29
, the Son suffers forsakenness and the
Father suffers the death of the Son. This is not something the Father
and Son merely identify with, but is in God, and since Father and
Son love and are open to the world, this history of the cross includes
all human suffering.
The concrete history of God in the death of Jesus on the cross
on Golgotha therefore contains within itself all the depths and

26
Church Dogmatics, IV.2, p 357.
27
Church Dogmatics, pp 164f.
28
The Crucified God, p 152.
29
The Crucified God, pp 243f. See Barths Church Dogmatics, IV.2, p 357.
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abysses of human history [A]ll human history is taken up
into the history of God, i.e. into the trinity.
30

What proceeds from this event between Father and Son is the
Spirit which justifies the godless, fills the forsaken with love and
even brings the dead alive, since even the fact that they are
dead cannot exclude them from this event of the cross; the
death in God also includes them.
31
The suffering of God is a Trinitarian suffering which takes into itself
all creaturely suffering. Like the cross of Christ even Auschwitz is in
God, taken up into the grief of the Father, the surrender of the Son
and the power of the Spirit.

Fiddes puts our human suffering within the suffering of God in a way
clearly linked to his theme of participation. God exists, he argues, in
triune relationships, and God has made room for us to participate in
these movements of relationship. God is not merely alongside us in
our suffering, but we are taken up into the movements of Gods own
suffering, participating in them: our suffering is a participation in God
(a perfection of them as in Colossians?). Not simply accompanied by a
fellow sufferer who understands (Whitehead), we are embraced by
movements of suffering love like those, for instance, between a
father who has lost a beloved son and a son who has been forsaken
and abandoned by all whom he loves.
32

Any sympathetic treatment of Gods suffering will want to ask about
the extent to which God remains the Lord. We may feel that we need
to affirm dialectically that God both suffers and does not suffer.
Process thought often comes under criticism as delivering a God who
is unsafe who will become the supreme victim. But Process thought
is more complex than the caricature often given of it. True,

30
The Crucified God, p 246.
31
The Crucified God, p 244 (see also p 245).
32
Participating in God, p 162.
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Hartshornes language of Gods abstract and concrete poles does
suggest that to think of God as in any sense absolute or impassible is
to abstract from the livingness of God. Concretely, as it were, God is
relative, passible. But Whiteheads language is different and more
readily interpreted to mean that God really is both primordial and
consequent, in some ways absolute and in some ways relative
perhaps both in some ways impassible and in some ways passible.
With Whitehead it is clearer that both primordial and consequent
natures are abstractions from what I have called the livingness of God.

But, as Fiddes suggests, part of our experience of suffering is a sense
helplessness in the face of it. If God at any moment could revoke or
transform it in what sense is this suffering other than a form of
masochism? He examines Frances Youngs poignant treatment of the
matter in her narrative essay in suffering, Face to Face. Young
argues that we can only cope with suffering if God suffers but also if
there is some aspect of God which is beyond suffering, a dark side,
beyond passion.
33
Fiddes prefers, among other things, to see God
beyond suffering in the resurrection that is beyond the cross in the
promise of Gods final triumph.

So a question emerges more clearly here about the pastors care for
one who is suffering. To what extent can and should the pastor
remain in some respects at least removed from, safe from,
invulnerable to, the suffering of those for whom she cares. I have
suggested that we might need to affirm that God both exposes Godself
to suffering and yet remains in some way apart from it. Process
thought with its dipolar conception of God has always suggested
something like this. A doctrine of the Trinity with a full theology of
incarnation would seem to make this possible. Something similar
seems to be required of the human pastor too: the pastor must, in

33
Participating in God, pp 180ff.
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common humanity, give himself or herself wholly to the suffering of
another. In empathetic imagination and loving solidarity they bear
the suffering of the other and so help them bear what might be
unbearable. In so doing the represent, and re-present, the way God
bears our suffering in Christ. But in role the pastor must also remain
apart from it. Professional good practice in remaining detached
enough to be helpful requires it, and indeed the cared-for will also
expect and hope for the degree of detachment that comes from role.
That these two contradictory responses should be born by one person
is a demanding prospect, and yet the pastors task is to integrate them
in their one ministerial person.

Perhaps the pastors witness - a witness given by Kennedy in the
trenches is more like Youngs mysterious both/and. And in so doing
the pastor might provide a model that illumines the very being of God.
Then we might suspect of course, that it is God who shapes this
pastoral task and pastoral relationship in the first place and what
we thought was a pointer to the nature of God is just a pale reflection
of it after all.
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